by Brenda Beust Smith

“Love is like seaweed; even if you have pushed it away, you will not prevent it from coming back.” – a Nigerian proverb
That’s a nice thought, but probably not much comfort to Bolivar beachgoers who are facing one of the most voluminous seaweed in-flows in a long time. And yet, probably at least some of those griping folks will go home and apply lawn/plant fertilizers that contain seaweed. It’s been used for this purpose ever since man started gardening.

(This article excerpted from the June 7 “Lazy Gardener & Friends Newsletter”)
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Our seaweed (sargassum) comes from the Sargasso Sea, the only “sea” on earth with no shoreline. This Atlantic Ocean gyro (or pocket), just east of Bermuda, was first documented by Christopher Columbus and, back then, its masses of sargassum were often mistakenly thought to be as threatening to ships as the infamous Bermuda Triangle (just southwest of the Sargasso Sea). Now we know it’s a integral part of the ocean’s ecology. In fact, those turtle eggs hatching on our shores? The babies will head into the Gulf currents, be carried out to the Sargasso Sea, and there they’ll grow up, returning to our shores to lay eggs for the next generation.

Who else would tell you these things?

What no one knows exactly is why we suddenly have these unusual inflows. They suspect a number of diverse factors must all coincide at the same time. Perhaps studies now underway will help someday with advance warnings.

When we built our first Bolivar Peninsula beachhouse in the ’70s, many homes included vegetable gardens. One was carefully tended by a man named Cooper, who also grew beautiful roses, tenderly protected from Gulf winds by fencing, and sold his okra, tomatoes and chickens’ eggs to all us neighbors.

Cooper, our neighbors John & Doris Robinson and others would haul seaweed up from the beach, spread it over lawns or picnic tables, water it profusely and then spread it on the gardens. They swore by its nutritional value. I asked why all that salt didn’t kill the plants. Cooper thought that was funny, pointing out that all plants on the peninsula are coated with salt spray every day.

I hauled some back to Houston, but made the mistake of not immediately washing it to remove the many organisms it shelters. Talk about stink! Husband put an end to that idea.

So, with the abundance of seaweed now, why aren’t folks hauling home all this free fertilizer? Our area’s foremost soil/mulch expert, my boss John Ferguson of Nature’s Way Resources, agrees it’s very nutritional, though perhaps not as much so as on the northeast coast where most seaweed is collected for commercial plant fertilizer distribution.

“Seaweed has over 90 elements in it (major, minor and trace minerals) that will help all plants grow stronger, more disease and pest resistance and with much higher nutrition,” John points out. Food grown with seaweed tastes better. It adds organic matter to the soil or compost and contains growth hormones that help plants grow quicker.”

Turning a commercial profit with all this seaweed is another story, John says. It may look thick on the ground (and certainly does when Galveston County’s front-end loaders shove it up into the dunes, where it does help make them more stable). But seaweed is about 90% water. And it’s seasonal.

Several years ago, when I suggested readers take seaweed home for their gardens, naysayers came out of the woodwork. That, they said, is stealing from public property.

Yeh, right. I bet Bolivar powers-that-be would happily look the other way if anyone wants to take some of this seaweed home!